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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Payday Loan Text Spam

I got this text today on my cellphone from Melissa@currentdata.info

Subject:Paying Attention Do you need to best way to pay your bills before pay check? go-t0<( http://lnx.lu/ZQf )>sdSuuvveyGT

A WHOIS search of currentdata.info revealed that the site is registered anonymously through Domains By Proxy which, in my opinion, automatically makes this an unreliable company to do business with. After all, if they were a reputable company, they wouldn't have anything to hide, would they? And if they didn't already know that most people would delete any Payday Loan emails they sent out, they wouldn't force people to receive and read it by sending it out via text message on cellphones. Right?

Well, a WHOIS search can reveal a bit more than who a website is registered to. It can also tell you the website's IP address and knowing the IP address can give you a better idea as to where the people who sent out a text message really are located, unless they've outsourced that job to a Third World country.

The IP address actually comes from the vicinity of Tempe, Arizona, USA and the servers are dedicated specifically to currentdata.info by Secure Servers, LLC.

The actual text of the message I received tells me that the person who composed it either isn't a native speaker of English or is just badly educated. It doesn't really matter which it is. The website was created in August 2012, so I can hazard a guess that these people are relatively new to textspamming and bought a list of contacts through the typical channels used by spammers. It probably seemed like a better way for them to go than to try to build-up a real reputation as the Go-To place for payday loans. There are so many similar companies out there - and a good number of them has a long list of complaints against them over how they do business and how they treat their customers - who would notice one more?

Due to the underhanded nature of how Current Data is advertising itself via textspamming people without their consent, I'd strongly advise any other recipients of their message to simply ignore them. My gut feeling is that they shouldn't be trusted.

Okay, I need to post this update: there have been a few people trying to comment on this post who have included links to their payday loan websites either in comments or in their profile link. I will not allow you people to spam my comments section. If you want to comment, fine. But, I will not allow anyone to advertise their business in my comments section, no matter what their business may be.